Tech News

Global

Bard becomes Gemini

Google has transformed Bard into Gemini, launching a mobile app and introducing Gemini Advanced with Ultra 1.0. This service is accessible in more than 150 countries and territories in English, with plans to expand to additional languages over time. Gemini Advanced is part of Google's new AI Premium Plan at $19.99/month, offering expanded features and integration with Google Workspace. It’s almost better than ChatGPT. Check out this video for more.

Apple Vision Pro: hit or a miss?

It’s great until it isn’t. Well, Apple Vision Pro exactly delivers on its promises but faces unforeseen challenges like eye fatigue, blurriness, and much more. But I am positive about this tech. The first iPhone wasn’t great but it created a new ecosystem of products that are unmatched today.

India

Kashmir Bat Makers Look To Sue Over Shark Tank India Claims; Seek INR 500 Cr In Damages

Tramboo Sports, a “bat manufacturer” appeared on Shark Tank India and made a deal. While pitching they claimed to be the only “lite willow” bat manufacturers while they bought their bats from Alfa Sports. Hence Alfa Sports is suing Shark Tank and Tramboo Sports for defamation and other charges.

How much do Indian startup founders and CEOs make in 2023

Check out the link to see the details but generally, it widely ranges based on the stage of start-up, funding, profits, operating revenue, and much more.

Open source Github Repos

Answer for the last week’s question

Imagine you are building a next-gen AI software product. Say, for example, AI-based voice cloning software like OpenVoice. How do you prevent someone from misusing it for the wrong purposes? I will give my thoughts next week.

For text-based AI-generated, the content will have tone similarity across the generated text. This is rarely seen when we write as humans. We write as we think and hence we make subtle changes in tone and vocabulary which is not noticed in AI-generated content. But there are no deterministic ways to find out text-based content.

For image-based AI-generated content, Meta has developed an invisible watermark. Check this article to know more. Audio content can also be watermarked with inaudible frequency. A popular scam that is happening now is, a “relative” will call you and ask for money urgently, they will have the same voice as your actual relative. In cases like this make sure to ask personal questions only you and they know to make sure.

Though provoking thread

Are we living in a simulation?

Well the short answer is we could be, but that should be the least of our concerns says this quantum researcher. He argues that the simulation theory can be real and we might be simulations but that would mean there would be micro and macro simulations ie, Quantum simulations, and Greater universal simulations as well. The question becomes why does it matter? Can we understand the simulation and leverage it? Well, that’s sort of what physics and science people are trying to do but there are bigger theories on how certain things don’t seem to correlate, and physics laws are broken, and hence the simulations could be ever-evolving.

At an individual level, does it really matter? How will you change your life if you know that you are indeed living in a simulation?

Interesting Engineering blog

Indies

Smaller PRs are better PRs

The author talks about advantages like 1. can be reviewed faster 2. can be reviewed more thoroughly 3. fewer bugs 4. easier to roll back 5. fewer conflicts

If you thought tech nerds are not crazy, think again
How I put my whole life into a single database

Read this one yourself (cause I will be doing an injustice summarising this)!!

Big tech

How Notion sharded their monolith PostgreSQL to increase performance

They sharded their monolith DB to 32 physical tables and 480 logical shards based on workspace_id as their partition key. The article contains details on how and why they performed this activity. Highly recommended read.

Coding Challenge

This week let’s build a small search engine
Check out this article for a step-by-step on how to build a smaller search engine.

A search engine in 80 lines of Python

The author walks you through how he built a smaller search engine for smaller websites using the Okapi BM25 ranking algorithm.

Cool Car Wallpaper

Job board - India

Big Tech

Microsoft is still hiring

Amazon - Software Development Engineer

Startups

Java Developer - Freshminds - Freshers only

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